Brain Freeze
Tech mystery Severance examines a very dodgy work/life balance
WITH TECH STEADILY giving us the ability to bypass so many of life’s mind-numbing tasks, it begs the question: if you could do that on a more dramatic level, would you? Apple TV+’S new sci-fi series Severance poses a world where that’s an option.
It’s set in the near future, where employees of the almost 150-yearold Lumon Industries can choose to undergo a “severance” procedure which, via an incision in the brain, separates a person’s work life from their home life. Once inside the Lumon building’s elevator, the employee sheds all memories of their “outie” life and exists for eight hours inside the windowless bubble of their job functions.
Adam Scott (Krampus) is Mark Scout, a recent widower drowning in grief who undertakes the severance to check out from his sorrow. But when his office best friend, Petey (Yul Vázquez), disappears from the office and appears in Mark’s outside life, a bigger conspiracy unfolds.
The high-concept idea is from the mind of series creator Dan Erickson. “I was working a series of temp jobs and this whole concept started because I was walking into work one day and caught myself fantasising: ‘What if I could just skip the next eight hours? I would totally jump ahead to 5pm’,” Erickson chuckles to Red Alert. “And then I was like, that’s a messed-up thing to catch yourself wishing for, being able to just abdicate some of this precious time we have on Earth. I was scared that I had caught myself thinking that, and that anxiety has carried this thing all the way through.”
With Ben Stiller championing Erickson’s spec script as an executive producer and director on the series, Severance also boasts an impressive cast including John Turturro, Christopher Walken and Patricia Arquette.
Erickson says that through Mark the show explores both the insidious potential of corporations to use this kind of tech, but also the everyday people who would volunteer to do this to themselves. “When I was going through these different corporate environments, there was just this weird, dark, unspoken sense that everything that makes you unique, those tend to be the same qualities that they don’t want to see,” Erickson says about the corporate dichotomy. “Over time, they discourage you from being a full human. They try to hone your focus on what you’re doing, which makes sense, but it’s kind of a frightening process. I think that if they did have the ability to amputate your identity and your individuality, of course they would do it.”
But then, Erickson adds, “The other side of it is, what would cause a person to do this? I think that’s the scarier question because we all have elements of our lives, of ourselves, that we don’t like, or that aren’t useful to us in certain settings.”
Over the course of season one, Erickson says, Mark and his Lumon office team will represent the full array of human acceptance to their severance choices, ranging from Turturro’s all-in Irving to Britt Lower’s relentlessly rebellious Helly.
“We had these great conversations about how similar the characters were on the inside and the outside,” Erickson says of his talks with the cast. “But the [characters] do come to see themselves as different people.
“I think with the ‘innies’ especially, there’s this growing resentment of ‘Who the hell is my outie to put me in here? Why do they get to go and walk the Earth and have a whole life and then just push all of their work on to me and keep me in this prison?’ It’s a weird form of self-loathing that develops where, rather than blaming the company, they’re angry at themselves, which I think is kind of by design.”
Asked if the plot theads about Lumon’s larger purpose with the technology and Mark’s increased mingling of his “outie” and “innie” lives will collide by season’s end, Erickson teases that those answers will, hopefully, reveal themselves over multiple seasons.
“I had an endpoint in mind, but it did change,” he shares. “Ben has this instinct to pull back on things and slow down a little bit and let the story breathe more organically. With that in mind, I had a few more story beats beyond where we ended up getting in season one. Where we end now is the perfect choice, because I always knew that this barrier can’t hold. The show is about these two worlds affecting each other. There was going to be some clashing of these worlds that happened.” TB
We all have elements of ourselves that we don’t like, or that aren’t useful to us